Cutting loose at Lehi Roller Mills from “Footloose”

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Like every child of the 80s, we love Footloose, so when we got the chance to stop at Lehi Roller Mills, where Kevin Bacon spent so much time in the movie, we put on our dancing shoes and pulled on up…

When Footloose originally shot scenes at the Lehi Roller Mills in Lehi, UT, the area around it was still rural and desolate, but today Lehi Roller Mills from Footloose sits just off a major interstate with chain-fast-food-hell quickly crowding in on this wonderfully classic operation.

If you’re a Footloose fan, you remember the mills as where Kevin Bacon worked and where they held the dance (well, the dance was actually filmed in a studio), but the whole place almost didn’t make it into the movie at all…

The executive producer of Footloose, Daniel Melnick, had been eying the mill for years as he drove by on his way home each day, and finally, he stopped in and introduced himself and asked if he could film a movie there.

Sherm Robinson, former owner of the Lehi Roller Mills, was hesitant to accept his business’s invitation to be in the now-classic Footloose, worried OSHA would have an absolute meltdown about all these actors and film crew members floating around a working flour mill.

The filmmakers, in true filmmaker-big-shot-Hollywood style, “cut through the red tape in record time,” according to the Desert News- which sounds fancier and slicker than what probably happened… one phone call to a bored OSHA worker.

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Of course, having a film crew at your business did come with some disruptions for the mill’s day-to-day. Robinson told the Desert Sun, “It did disrupt the work, particularly when they filmed a scene with a fire three nights in a row, a scene that never made it into the movie.”

Today, Lehi Roller Mills get visitors from around the world, all seeking a little piece of Footloose. For people into baking, their flour is excellent, and you can follow along on their Facebook page for all sorts of cool recipes for said flour. For us, however, toting a sack of flour across the country seemed like a very, very bad idea, especially since we’re not so hot in the kitchen. We settled for a new, empty Lehi Roller Mills flour sack, a cheap souvenir from an 80s classic filming location.